Every day I hear from listeners of this podcast who reach out and tell me things like this. They say, Melody, I just spent three hours crafting an email to my VP yesterday only to delete and rewrite it seven times before hitting send, and I’m still not sure I got my point across.

Or I have all of these great ideas in meetings, but by the time I work up the courage to speak, someone else has already said what I was thinking. Or worse, the conversation has moved on entirely.

They might say, when my boss asks me a question on the spot, my mind just goes blank. And then I spend the rest of the day thinking of all of the brilliant things I should have said.

That’s exactly what today’s episode is about, taking you inside the habits of highly effective communicators.

The most successful people we have worked with in our programs, they get a few things right that make all of the difference. They are not necessarily the loudest, the most charismatic people in the room. They have simply mastered some fundamental communication habits that you can learn too.

And I’m glad you’re listening to this, that you are thinking about this because at your level, the difference between good and exceptional communication can determine a lot. Whether your ideas get funded, your recommendations get implemented, your team gets behind your vision, or you land the job or the opportunity that you actually want.

And when you think about it, everything you do at work is communication. You write emails, you have conversations, you have decks that you put together.

Our entire days are spent figuring out how do we translate what is in our heads into something that others can understand and they can act on.

When you nail this, that’s when magic happens. We have had clients that have told us, I used one of your frameworks in a meeting last week, and instead of the usual back and forth, my C-level leader approved the full amount I was looking for in just a few minutes. Or we had another person who told us I finally stopped overexplaining in my emails and my team actually started putting into practice my suggestions without tons and tons of follow-up questions.

We have to be real about the flip side here too. What happens when our communication isn’t sharp, when it’s not clear and compelling?

Like when you sit in that quarterly review you spend all weekend preparing for. You’ve got the data, you actually know your stuff, but when someone asks you to explain the drop in your metrics, that’s when your mind freezes. You start rambling while watching everybody else’s eyes glaze over. Or that time when you thought you sent a straightforward email about some project delays, only to have your colleagues storm into your office an hour later and say, why did you throw us under the bus like that? You thought you were just stating the facts, but somehow something in your warning made them feel attacked, and now instead of actually solving the problem, you’re spending three days repairing a relationship that didn’t need to be broken in the first place.

These types of moments don’t have to cost you respect your confidence or opportunities. This is one of the main reasons I wrote my new book, Managing Up How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge, because persuading those in power, whether it’s your boss, a skip level leader, a client, a vendor, that can be particularly difficult.

This is also why I’ve decided to host a free three day masterclass. It’s called Speak Up Be Heard. All you need to do is head to melodywilding.com/masterclass and you can grab your spot. This is happening May 6th, 7th, and 8th, and we go live one hour each day. And we’re going to share with you proven tools and strategies that will help you go from rambling to respected, and from overlooked to well compensated.

On day one, we’re going to dive into elevating your executive presence. Even if you are someone who has maybe a more naturally quiet style, you’re going to learn how do you stay calm and composed even when you are anxious inside. How to express your ideas clearly without second guessing every word, and get your voice heard even in a room full of strong personalities.

Day two will be all about saying no, standing your ground without being a jerk. We’re going to talk about how do you push back on unreasonable demands without burning bridges? How do you overcome the guilt of not being a team player and exactly what to do when someone just will not take no for an answer?

On day three, we will master the art of self-advocacy. While staying true to yourself. You’ll discover how do you articulate your achievements without feeling like you’re boasting. How do you navigate office politics to build trust and influence. And position yourself for that promotion raise or the career growth that you deserve.

This masterclass is perfect for mid-career professionals who know their stuff, know they have expertise, but struggle to articulate it as clearly as they would like. It’s for the overthinkers, the people pleasers, those who have been told they need to speak up more or just be more confident without being given the actual tools to make that happen.

So if you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you know, I do not do fluff. Every strategy that we will share is something we’ve personally used or we have taught to our hundreds of clients that have gone on to secure promotions, negotiate raises, lead highly successful teams. We consistently hear that these masterclasses we host are some of the best trainings people have ever attended on these topics because we focus on practical solutions that actually work in the real world in today’s workplace.

So if you are tired of watching other people advance while you feel like your contributions go unnoticed, then you definitely don’t wanna miss this. And you have no reason to because it’s completely free. It’s a no brainer. So just head to melodywilding.com/masterclass and that’s where you can grab your spot.

Now let’s get into those habits of highly effective communicators. These work and are true whether you are pitching a client, you are presenting to your team, you are trying to influence leadership decisions. They are deceptively simple. But simple does not mean easy. Achieving simplicity is actually often the hardest part.

If you’ve ever watched someone who’s an Olympic swimmer, their movements look effortless, right as they glide through the water. They seem so elegant. But that comes from practice and refinement. And the same is true for these habits as well.

Habit number one is to master the lost art of audience intelligence. When I ask people why they struggle to speak up so confidently, they often say that they don’t feel comfortable with the people who are in the room, the people they have to address.

This isn’t just about being an introvert, because even the most outgoing people can freeze when they are speaking to those they don’t know when they’re in a room of unfamiliar faces and the stakes are high.

Likewise, it’s not enough to know somebody’s role or title. You also have to know a bit about how they operate. What kind of evidence is your director going to find convincing? Are they more convinced by data or stories? Is your team lead someone who likes to talk things out, or do they prefer to process quietly and then respond in writing? Those little things about your audience, that intelligence makes a big difference. When you don’t have that baseline of how you expect people to behave, that’s when the second guessing comes in. You start to wonder why did they say it that way? Why are they asking that question? Are they unhappy? Do they not trust me? Did I miss something? It creates much more stress than needed.

So pay attention to their patterns. Maybe you notice your CEO shuts down when somebody raises a problem without offering a fix along with it. Maybe one of your product managers gets defensive when timelines are challenged. Those reactions are not random. They are signals. And once you learn what sets someone off, what puts them at ease, you can navigate those conversations with way, way less guesswork.

Even simple things like tone, pacing, visuals, those matter. Some people wanna fast pace, they want bullet point updates. Others want background before they’ll engage. Some think best with charts. Others want stories. When you speak in a way that lines up with how they think you are getting your point across and you are building trust.

It helps to think of this a little like building a mental profile for each person you work with over time, you start to build an intuitive sense of how to approach them, so your message lands with them the first time. And this isn’t about manipulation, this is about making sure things go smoother for them and for you.

Plus, if you consider yourself someone who has high emotional intelligence, someone who thinks deeply, feels strongly, what we call around here, a sensitive striver, you probably need and want some level of connection before your communication really flows. And that’s why I am always reminding our clients meaningful connection does not start once the meeting begins. It starts way, way, way before you even walk in that room.

So most people make the mistake of spending so much time focusing on their content. They’re polishing their slides, they’re rehearsing what they’re going to say, but that’s just one piece. What really helps your message land is the relationship behind it. So you need to get to know your key stakeholders outside of the formal meeting time.

Say hello in the hallway, ask how their day is going in your one-on-one. Follow up on something they mentioned in passing. Those little moments, again, this may seem so small, but this builds familiarity. Psychologically speaking, familiarity breeds likability. The more often we interact with someone, the more comfortable we feel around them, the more positively we tend to view them.

And when you have that baseline of how someone behaves, when the intimidating VP just becomes James, who told you about his daughter’s soccer tournament the other day, that changes the whole dynamic. Speaking up feels much less like a performance. It’s more just like continuing the conversation with someone you already know, and that comfort goes a very long way in helping you show up with greater confidence, clarity, and ease.

Habit number two. Highly effective communicators are ruthlessly clear.

In a world where we are all drowning in too much information, tons of demand on our attention, we have Slack pings, text messages, 47 tabs, spreadsheets back to back to back to back meetings.

Clarity is how you stand out, but the smarter, the more experienced you are, ironically, the harder this can be. And we see this all the time, people who are brilliant, thoughtful, well-intentioned, but then bury their message under too many words. And we do this for all sorts of reasons. We wanna sound intelligent. We want to be thorough in our response. We want to be taken seriously.

So we overexplain, we give context that no one asked for, and we pad every sentence with hedgers and qualifiers just, kind of, I think, maybe. All of this only dilutes your message. It makes it much harder for people to hear your actual point. It’s a distraction, and in most cases, if your message isn’t clear in the first few seconds, it’s lost. The average attention span is now less than 30 seconds, so you have to make the time you have count.

I once coached a client, I’ll call her Jess, who kept getting overlooked in meetings. She would bring great ideas to the table, but by the time she finished explaining them, people had already checked out. So what I asked her to do was to record herself speaking, and she realized through that she was using over 500 words when she only needed half of that. After just a few weeks of tightening her delivery, she sent me a note saying, same proposal, same message, my boss just called it refreshingly direct.

So what great communicators do differently is they lead with their main point instead of building up to it. That’s the complete opposite of how we’ve been taught to build an argument.

So this takes a good amount of unlearning. It takes practice to do. Great communicators, simplify. They don’t wanna dumb things down, but they do it to sharpen their own thinking. You can tell when someone understands a topic deeply because they can explain it clearly.

So here are a few ways you can start sharpening your clarity.

The next time you write an email, challenge yourself to cut it in half. Most people say it becomes instantly clearer just by doing that.

You can also try the 3, 30, 3 approach in your next presentation. 3, 30, 3. What’s the three second headline? What’s the 30 second version and what’s the three minute backup if needed?

There’s a reason that that quote, “if I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter,” that quote has stood the test of time, because concise communication is really hard. It forces you to make decisions. What matters most? What’s essential?

It’s much easier to ramble than it is to refine.

That’s why the best communicators often aren’t the ones who say the most, but the ones who say the right thing in the fewest words possible.

I had a very strong reminder of this constantly while I was writing my new book Managing Up, I cut hundreds of thousands of words in the process, entire drafts that were well written, but ultimately weren’t clear.

They wouldn’t serve you as the reader. It wasn’t about removing depth. I needed to refine it so that the message could actually land. The most valuable ideas are often the hardest to distill, and it’s in that editing process that we bring them into focus. So that is why I chose to structure the book around 10 Conversations to Manage Up.

When we can give shape to complex topics, when we can anchor the abstract in frameworks and structure, it makes it so much more accessible, useful, ultimately gets you better results.

Great communication is about making your thinking easier for others to absorb, not necessarily just proving how much you know.

Highly effective communicators have a plan if they are caught off guard. That’s habit number three.

The moments that shape your career, usually they’re not the ones you plan for. They’re not the deck you stayed up all night perfecting, or the team update you rehearsed three times. Usually they’re the unscripted moments. They’re the hallway chat with the senior leader. The unexpected follow-up question in a meeting, the quiet pause after someone says, what do you think about this? Those moments require presence over polish. Knowing everything is much less important than knowing how to show up and respond even when you don’t. Even when you are not the expert, you haven’t thought through something fully, or you feel taken aback.

The instinct for many thoughtful professionals, especially as Sensitive Strivers, is to over prepare. We want to anticipate every question, every scenario. And preparation is important, but too much of it can make you rigid. You have trouble adapting, responding in the moment, listening in real time, responding when things go off script.

So you want to aim for what I call “structured spontaneity.” Having some mental frameworks that let you organize your thinking quickly, so when you are caught off guard, you can still respond calmly and in a clear way. You want to have some scaffolding in your head that helps you land your point, even when you’re having to think out loud.

Sometimes the most powerful move is not trying to have an answer. It’s saying something like, you know, that’s a fair question and I would like to look into a few things before I give you a confident answer. Or you might say, I don’t know yet, but this is how I would think about approaching it. People don’t lose trust when you don’t know something.

They lose trust when you pretend you do, or when you shut down entirely, or just ramble and try to save face. People remember how you made them feel. Did you make them feel reassured, included, able to move forward with you less than what you actually said?

The irony is that all of this actually helps you build confidence. Just think about how good it feels to know. You can navigate through uncertainty, ambiguity. You can do that in an honest, composed way. You prove to yourself you can handle it. You stop bracing for every conversation like it’s a test. You walk in knowing you have the tools to respond, to hold your ground even when you don’t know everything.

That kind of quiet self-trust, it totally changes how you show up. You speak sooner, you take more initiative. You feel less rattled when things don’t go exactly as planned because you’ve trained yourself to find your footing as you go.

So let’s take a moment to bring this all together, our three habits of highly effective communicators. Building audience intelligence. Practicing ruthless clarity. And developing structured spontaneity.

These are practical, real world habits that can help your ideas, land your presence, carry weight, and your career move forward with less roadblocks and less stress.

You now know why familiarizing yourself with your audience matters. It gives you that baseline, that sense of, I know how to approach this person and I don’t have to second guess their every move. You’ve heard how clarity isn’t just about simplifying your message for them, it’s also refining it for you so that it’s easier to remember. It’s even more powerful, and you learn that confidence doesn’t come from having all of the answers, but from knowing how to handle yourself in the moment when things veer off course.

This is the kind of communication that opens doors, that gets buy-in for your big ideas that positions you as the go-to person when there are big decisions happening.

And this is exactly what we’re going to be digging into much more in our upcoming free three day masterclass. Speak Up, Be Heard. Make sure you have grabbed your spot. You can do that at melodywilding.com/masterclass.

If you are someone who has great ideas, but you struggle to articulate them, especially in the moment. If you want to get better at holding your own and high pressure conversations without feeling like you’re forcing it or faking it. If you want more influence, more recognition, more peace of mind at work than this masterclass is your next step. If you are ready to stop holding back, to start being heard, head over to melodywilding.com/masterclass. That’s where you can grab your spot. It is 100% free. So I can’t wait to see you there.

And I will catch you on the next episode.